


Between

by Fericita



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 22:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16941519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fericita/pseuds/Fericita
Summary: Somewhere in Wyatt's head, episode 1x14.





	Between

He comes out of the lifeboat, each time just as uncertain as the first. Reality remains as uncertain as it ever has been, and as he emerges he wonders at what new life may have been created or destroyed in the years between. Did a choice he made cause a friend to be erased and then, the thought that presses him down and sits like a stone on his chest even in the worst turbulence: could Jessica be here this time? Can an action he took or didn’t take have ricocheted through the years and knocked out his worst day, her worst day, her LAST day, and restored it?

It should feel like a rebirth. The lifeboat even looks like an egg. But when he comes out, it’s a new death each time. Jessica’s. His. Their life together. What had been a new chance to change the future dissipates into the new reality of another day with her gone. 

How can you move on when you spend every day in the past? Dreading the future has never been so hard as it became when the future could be so radically different each time you came home from work.

He has the power to create and destroy and cause and prevent, but none of the knowledge of what it will mean. It’s like he is playing god, but with eyes that only look in one direction. 

For so long he has only looked in one direction, to Jessica, to their past, to what happened that night. Now looking in the past might give him the chance to see her again in his future.

He emerges from the lifeboat and it it is like falling; there is a moment when he is not touching the ship and not touching the earth and he is between. He is between a lot these days. He looks back inside the ship and sees Rufus, a steady and certain pilot. Rufus gets him through more than wormholes and time. 

He looks ahead and sees Lucy. She also knows his unique loss. She has her own. Her sister, vanished from the earth and from every memory except Lucy’s. That kind of knowledge is a charge and a curse. 

He looks ahead and sees Lucy, and knows his purpose more fully than ever before. He can protect her. He sees that, and for the first time, it makes his future look like a birth instead of a death.

**Author's Note:**

> Just finished binge-watching Timeless, and I kept thinking about how tense it would be for our Time Team getting out of the Lifeboat after each trip, wondering what had changed it how it might have affected people they love. Especially for Wyatt and whether or not Jessica would still be alive in any new reality. And then the Charles Lindbergh/Ernest Hemingway episode happened, and Wyatt said “I am meant to protect the both of you. I see that now, and I will,” and this is what I think was going on in his head before he had that realization.


End file.
